Note: Descriptions are shown in the official language in which they were submitted.
WO 2022/074400
PCT/GB2021/052613
High-resolution electrical measurement data processing
Field of the Invention
The invention provides methods and apparatus for processing of measurement
data related
to an electrical power grid or other electrical apparatus by using machine
learning
techniques and providing anomalous event detection from the electrical
measurement data.
Background
Stopping climate change motivates implementation of renewable energy sources
such as wind
and solar with much smaller carbon footprints than non-renewable sources.
However, the
behaviour of renewable sources may be irregular and can bring challenges for
consistent
operation in power distribution systems. Utility-scale (>1 MVV) solar farm
owners may suffer
from significant plant failure rates, reduced equipment life, unplanned
outages, and
replacement overheads. These problems can be countered through better
condition
monitoring data collection and knowledge discovery to automatically understand
issues and
predict problems before they occur.
Monitoring tools can provide more granular and higher accuracy data capture
together with
precise timing information. However, there can be problems in the capability
to process the
data and detect anomalous behaviour, faults and failure modes.
Summary of Invention
According to a first aspect, the present invention provides a method of
processing high
resolution electrical measurement data according to claim 1. According to a
second aspect,
the present invention provides a system for processing high resolution
electrical measurement
data according to appended claim 15. Further optional features are provided in
the appended
dependent claims.
The inventors of the present invention have determined that high resolution
data that may
have been received from a sensor such as micro-synchrophasor measurement unit
(pPM U)
data can be collected and analysed alongside power quality measurement data
that may have
been received from another sensor such as a power quality monitor (PQM), both
the pPMU
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and PQM located proximal to a power generating array such as a photovoltaic
cell (solar)
farm, and one or more machine learning techniques can be used for processing
of the data
for remote and automatic anomaly detection. Resolution can determine the
precision of a
measurement. High resolution data can be measured and will provide high
precision. The
variation to the resolution can affect the performance and processing (time
and computational
complexity) but the examples described herein may be adapted to work with
different
resolution data and the invention has been found to provide particularly
effective results at
high resolutions where information may be obtained, for example, from a micro-
synchrophasor
measurement unit.
The micro-synchrophasor measurement unit and power quality monitor may be
integrated into
a grid data unit that can provide high-resolution, high-precision, time-
stamped data. The
micro-synchrophasor may be configured to operate in the frequency-domain to
process an
electrical signal and collect a first set of data points; and the power
quality monitor may be
configured to operate in the time-domain to process the electrical signal and
collect a second
set of data points. The grid data unit may be configured to apply the same
synchronised
timestamp to the collected first and second sets of data points. A time-series
database may
receive the high resolution data, preferably via a secure telemetry. Time-
series databases are
better suited to such high volume measurements than relational databases. The
database
may be a data lake that can contain structured or unstructured data. This more
efficient and
effective grid data unit apparatus matches the volume (prospectively
quadrillions of data-
points amounting to petabytes) and rate of data collection with suitable
handling and storage
capacities. While the grid data hardware and database / data lake could
operate independent
of the other, together they provide an integrated solution offering superior
performance with a
reduced amount of equipment required.
The machine learning techniques can include data-driven unsupervised learning
of data
received from a micro-syncrophasor unit to detect an anomalous electrical
event from the solar
farm which may be connected to a power distribution system.
The machine learning techniques may use a partitioning based clustering method
such as
Clustering Large Applications based upon Randomised Search (CLARANS) to
process the
large amount of data that may be generated by the grid data unit. The
clustering can identify
clusters of data and distinctly separate data patterns occurring in the data.
Abnormalities or
outlier events can be identifiable from the clustered data which may be
graphically represented
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and subsequently analysed automatically. Power quality monitor data from the
power quality
monitor device which may have been collected less frequently than the data
from the micro-
synchrophasor measurement unit can be used to validate the detected outlier
events occurring
in the clustered data as the time stamping of the data is consistent between
the pPMU data
and the PQM. The voltage and current phasor data may then be analyzed further
to determine
more information relating to the outlier event such as whether there was a
fault event such as
a voltage dip event in a particular window of time.
Brief Description of the Drawings
Systems and methods are described in detail below, by way of example only,
with reference
to the accompanying drawings in which:
Figure 1 shows a schematic diagram of a data collection and processing system
according
to an example;
Figure 2 shows a schematic diagram of a data collection unit that may be used
in the
example of figure 1;
Figure 3 shows a method of data collection and processing according to an
example;
Figure 4 shows a data set transformation that may be performed according to an
example;
Figure 5 shows a method for processing high-resolution electrical measurement
data
regarding an electrical power grid according to an example;
Figure 6 shows a graphical representation of clustering outcomes in an example
experiment;
and
Figure 7 shows a graphical representation of voltage dips of the pPMU data on
the tested
day according to the example experiment.
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Detailed Description
Renewable power sources such as solar panels that work by absorbing sunlight
with
photovoltaic cells, generating direct current (DC) energy and then converting
it to usable
alternating current (AC) energy with the help of inverter technology. AC
energy then flows
through the electrical busbar and is distributed accordingly. Electrical
characteristics or
parameters of generated power from the power source and load may be collected
and
processed.
Referring to figure 1, in an example, a data collection and processing system
100 comprises
a data collection unit 110, a storage unit 120, a data processing unit 130,
and a user interface
140. The data collection unit 110 is described in more detail below with
reference to figure 2.
The storage unit 120 may be in a server that is located remote from the data
collection unit
110, for example, in the cloud. The processing unit 130 may also be located
remote from the
data collection unit and can process time-series data that is collected by the
data collection
unit 110 and received by the storage unit 120. The processing unit 130 may be
distributed
across a number of devices to carry out the processing functionality or there
may be a plurality
of processing modules are different locations. The processing may include
cleaning the data
from the data collection unit to remove entries that include missing data,
compressing or
sampling the time series data, and transforming the data into a vector
representation that
represents the time series data into a plurality of data sets representing a
subset of the time
series data. The processing by the processor unit 130 may further include
performing a
clustering technique to segregate the data into two or more clusters and
generating a
representation of the segregated data. The user interface 140 may display
information relating
to the generated representation of the segregated data. The clustered data
which is a
segregated form of the data that is generated according to the clustering
technique may
include outlier data that is part of a cluster but that is relatively far from
the medoid of the
particular cluster that it is part of. Such outlier data may be furthest from
or far removed from
a particular inter-cluster medoid or centroid or centre of the cluster and can
be identifiable as
outlier data manually through inspection of the generated representation or
automatically
using thresholds above or below which represent outliers. The inter-cluster
medoid or centroid
may be representative of the higher density data patterns and the centre of
the cluster. The
outlier data can be related to an anomalous event. Validation of the outlier
data may be carried
out by identifying time and magnitude information of the outlier data from the
vector
representation and mapping with time series data previously obtained from the
grid data unit
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to precisely identify the outlier data and detect a related anomalous event.
The user interface
140 provides a means for user interaction with the various units 110,120,130
and each of the
units may be provided with its own user interface or a single user interface
may interact with
one or more of the units110,120,130. The user interface may interact with a
user, for example,
by conveying data to a user such as by displaying visual images, graphs,
results, and by
receiving user input. The system may be part of a power generation system and
network and
can provide highly accurate information on the state of the generating
equipment and power
network. Such information can be used to make operational decisions to
maximise utilization
of the power generation plant. In some examples, the system is used to
optimise the utilization
of solar farms, wind turbines, electrical loads, transmission & distribution
systems, or energy
storage plants, or other electrical facilities.
Referring to figure 2, an example of the data collection unit 110 is described
in more detail. In
the example, the data collection unit is a grid data unit (GDU) 110 that can
be installed at a
solar panel site to collect electrical characteristics such as, current, and
voltage of generated
power from a photovoltaic cell (PV). A micro-synchrophasor (pPMU or microPMU)
instrument
111 is incorporated into the GDU 110. The microPMU is a high-resolution
variant of phasor
measurement units (PM U). Each GDU may further comprise a power quality
monitor (PQM)
unit 112. The pPMU instrument 111 and the PQM unit 112 may work as an
operative pair of
signal analysers. The GDU 110 provides mechanical protection, instrument
power, and
telecoms equipment for data backhaul which can be shared by the pPMU
instrument 111 and
the PQM 112. Alternatively, each of the pPMU and the PQM has its own separate
and not
shared power supply, data storage and telemetry equipment. Furthermore, the
GDU 110 may
comprise other components 113 that may include a Global Positioning System
(GPS) receiver
for precision timestamping to sub-100ns, solid-state memory for data-buffering
and secure
bidirectional 3G/4G cellular data telemetry equipment with the twice-per-cycle
(100/120 Hz)
data-reporting rate. Waveform A/D conversion occurs at 4MHz with a sampling
frequency of
25.6 kHz, disciplined by a GPS clock; for each half cycle of the voltage
frequency (50 Hz in
UK), voltage and current phasors are calculated, resulting in a 100 Hz data-
reporting rate.
This can be subsequently down-sampled where necessary into a data-rate
required to suit the
analysis being performed, by use of standard post-processing techniques. The
phasor
amplitude and angle accuracies of the pPMU instrument may be +1-0.05% and +/-
0.01
respectively, producing a total vector error of +/-0.01%, although practical
measurement
uncertainty is determined by the upstream voltage and current transducers.
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The pPMU 111 operates in the frequency domain and is used to collect voltage
and current
phasor measurement data for each half cycle at 10 milliseconds reporting
periods (100Hz in
the UK). It may be configured to process an electrical signal and collect a
first set of data
points. It records the measurement of data with a time stamp and the
measurement data may
be one or more of: three phase voltages, three phase voltage angles, three
phase current,
three phase current angles, centre frequency offset, c37 frequency,
fundamental power,
fundamental apparent power, fundamental of reactive power global positioning
system,
latitude, longitude. The PQM 112 may be configured to operate in the time-
domain to process
the electrical signal and collect a second set of data points. It may provide
a power quality
function including an array of high-accuracy measurements according to the I
EC 61000-4-30
Ed 3 Class A standard plus supra-harmonics in the 2-150 kHz range. The PQM 112
may have
a lower time resolution of data being collected, for example, every 1 minute,
and can be
configured to send an alert to a user when an anomalous event such as a
voltage sag or flicker
is detected. The GDU 110 may be configured to apply the same synchronised
timestamp to
the collected first and second sets of data points. One-day data from the pPMU
111 can
include each minute files that consist of six thousand rows representing each
10 milliseconds
of data. Therefore, the measurement data will be a high time resolution and
can include 8.64
million data points in a single day for each parameter. International patent
application No.
PCT/GB2019/051413 describes the use of a grid data unit including pPM Us and
PQMs for
sensing, monitoring and collecting electrical data and the subject matter is
incorporated
herein.
The amount of solar data collected by the grid data unit and particularly the
pPMU 111 can be
so large, fast, complex (provides several power parameters related to solar
farm) that it may
be difficult to process using traditional methods or manual analysis. However,
irregular (or,
abnormal) electrical characteristics of generated power from a PV brings
challenges relating
to consistent operation in power distribution systems, significant plant
failure, reduction in
equipment life, unplanned outages, and increase in the replacement overheads.
In addition to
the increasing velocities and varieties of electrical parameters, solar and
wind farm data
stream flows are unpredictable due to the sudden environmental changes (occur
often) where
magnitudes vary greatly, and can damage associated electrical equipment. Also,
it can be
difficult to link, match, cleanse and transform solar data across systems to
find correlation
between events and hierarchies. Hence, it is challenging to understand
electrical power (and
related parameter) trends and how to manage daily or regularly, seasonal and
event-triggered
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peak data loads for maintaining solar farms, wind turbines, electrical loads,
transmission &
distribution systems, energy storage plants, or other electrical facilities.
Figure 3 shows a method of data collection and processing according to an
example that may
use the system such as that discussed in relation to figure 1. At 201, data is
monitored and
collected by a sensing unit such as the grid data unit described in relation
to figure 2. Such
data may relate to a characteristic of an electrical signal that has been
generated from an
electrical source which may be a renewable energy source such as a PV systems.
The
characteristic may include one or more of voltage, current and frequency. In
particular, the
characteristic can be three phase voltages, three phase voltage angles, three
phase current,
three phase current angles, centre frequency offset, c37 frequency,
fundamental power,
fundamental apparent power, and / or fundamental of reactive power global
positioning
system, latitude, longitude.
The characteristic of the electrical signal is monitored and data relating to
the characteristic is
collected at reporting periods. In an example, and as mentioned in relation to
the pPMU in
figure 2, data is collected for each half cycle at 10 millisecond reporting
periods. It will be
appreciated that, instead of 10 milliseconds, alternative reporting periods
may be provided to
collect high time resolution data. Data from the PQM may also be collected
regularly and may
be at a different lower time resolution to the data from the pPMU. The
electrical signal from
the power source is simultaneously monitored in the frequency-domain via the
pPMU and in
the time-domain using the PQM to collect time-domain data points and frequency
domain data
points. A congruent timestamp is applied to the collected time-domain data
points and
frequency-domain data points. In some examples, the timestamp applied to the
collected time-
domain data points and frequency-domain data points is derived by the same
method. As
each characteristic can be monitored and collected separately, each
characteristic that is
being monitored every 10 milliseconds can result in 8.64 million data points
of raw data
collected in a single day for that characteristic.
At 202, raw data may be sent to a server that is located remote to the grid
data unit for storage.
The high resolution data from the pPMU may then be further processed. The
processing of
data can include: (a) handling the data and its storage; and (b) automatic
data processing for
electrical trend finding. As a voltage source converter and its behavior is
the heart of PV solar
farm, the voltage has been considered for identifying the data irregularity
(or abnormality)
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processing the solar data in an example for ease of explanation although it
will be appreciated
that the processing can be carried out also for other characteristics that are
collected.
(a) Handling the data and its storage:
At 203, the raw data may be cleaned in that any time stamped data that is
missing from the
raw data is removed from the data set. This can reduce the size of the data
set by removing
missing data that would not provide any useful information from subsequent
processing. The
raw data from the pPMU can be large in volume and unstructured in nature. At
204, lossless
data compression can be carried out. In an example a column based storage
format is used
as oppose to a row based storage format (such as CSV). An example of a column
based
storage format is the Apache Parquet (an open source file) format which can be
used to create
a data lake or data warehouse which offers compressed, an efficient columnar
solar data
representation for further processing. A substantial reduction in data set
size can be obtained
using Apache Parquet and in one example an 83% reduction in file size may be
achieved
compared to a row based storage format such as CSV. It will be appreciated
that the cleaning
and compressing of the raw data can provide advantages but may not be needed
for automatic
electrical trend finding.
(b) Automatic data processing for electrical trend finding
Manual division and annotation of the data is too resource-intensive and
difficult if not
impossible while looking for anomalies (or irregular data behavior). Thus, the
goal specifies
here to separate two groups: regular/normal electrical trend, and irregular
electrical trends.
The best practice to achieve this goal is to create and map statistical
algorithms like, clustering.
By keeping in mind the fast processing and decision making, a clustering
approach can be
used based on CLARANS (Clustering Large Applications based on RANdomized
Search).
Compared to other clustering approaches, it has been found that the randomized
search and
the randomized selection of samples from the input data that is a property of
CLARANS
provides an effective and efficient technique where there is a large amount of
data such as
from a phasor measurement unit (PM U).
At 205, dataset transformation or conversion can be executed and the selection
of the extent
of the transformation will then affect the CLARANS clustering as this data
will be analysed
using CLARANS. An example of the transformation is shown in figure 4 where the
data set
containing 8.64 million time series data points of collected voltage values in
24 hours by the
pPMU is transformed into a feature vector table with 86400 indices Idx and
each row
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representing 100 voltage samples collected in 1 second. For example, the first
row which
relates to Idx:1 contains voltage values Vi to Vioo. The second row which
relates to Idx:2
contains voltage values V101 to V200 and so on up to a final row which relates
to Idx:86400
contains V8639900 to V8640000. It will be appreciated that different numbers
of indices and number
of voltage values per row may be selected but the transformation as selected
in figure 4 is
found to be effective for operation with CLARANS.
At 206, a clustering technique such as CLARANS can be carried out on the
transformed
dataset. Referring to figure 5, an example process that can be carried out
includes, at 301,
receiving high resolution electrical measurement data that is in a converted
feature vector data
format including a plurality of rows each containing a subset of the data (as
generated in 205,
for example). At 302, statistical clustering is carried out on the converted
feature vector data
from the high resolution electrical raw measurement data in order to separate
data into distinct
cluster groups. A first group may comprise a group of similar electrical
trends (magnitude) and
a second group may comprise a group of different electrical trends separated
from the first
group. Each cluster group has a plurality of data points, each corresponding
to a pattern
derived from the clustering technique performed on a row (eg. Idx of figure 4)
of the feature
vector table. Each cluster group will have a similar pattern which in this
example relates to
similar electrical trends. Each of the first and second cluster groups may
also comprise one or
more data points or patterns that are far removed or furthest from a centroid
or medoid of a
respective cluster group and such a data point can be identifiable as an
outlier. Both groups
may have their own outliers but do not share the same outlier as each outlier
is part one
particular cluster based on its pattern. A first representation may be
generated of the clustered
groups. At 303, the first representation can be analysed to identify an
outlier that relates to an
anomalous event. Although CLARANS is known, its use with high resolution
electrical
measurement data in the field of electrical energy generation and distribution
systems can
provide advantages in the field such as improvements in processing speed
particularly for big
data related to high resolution electrical measurement data from an apparatus
such as a
micro-synchrophasor or phasor measurement unit. CLARANS calculates two values,
the local
minima and maximum neighbour. The higher the value of the latter, the closer
that CLARANS
will be to other partitioning methods such as partitioning around medoids
(PAM) and the longer
it will take to perform each search of the local minima. This is an advantage
because the
quality of the local minima is higher, and a smaller number of local minima
are discovered
returning a best local optimal as the final result. CLARANS can select a
medoid from a row of
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the feature vector table randomly before iterations are carried out in
accordance with the
conventional CLARANS technique.
An example of the application of the CLARANS clustering technique is described
in more
detail below in relation to the data set shown in figure 4:
Input parameters:
a) amount of iterations for solving the problem (experimentally selected 100
in our case)
b) the maximum number of neighbors/behavior pattern examined: percentage of
neighbors X size (number of rows in transformed dataset,1)
= (0.001%X 86400)
= 186.41=86
c) the goal specifies here to separate two cluster groups that may relate to
different
electrical trends, thus the number of clusters we are looking for is two
(initial random
medoids will be 2).
Processing:
1. iteration 1=1 to 100
2. minimum distance using Euclidean cost=0;
3. optimal medoids=0;
4. Now 2 random data points are selected as current medoids and clusters are
formed using
these data points where Euclidean distance is used to find the nearest medoid
to form
clusters.
a. iteration j=1: j <= 86
b. A random current medoid is selected and a random candidate (random
neighbor)
datapoint is selected for replacement with current medoid.
c. If the replacement of candidate datapoint yields a lower Total Cost (which
is the
summation of distances between all the points in the clusters with their
respective
medoids) than the current medoid then the replacement is made. If replacement
is
done, then j is not incremented otherwise j = j +1.
5. Once j > 86, then the current medoids are taken and their Total Cost is
compared with
minimum cost. If the Total Cost is less then minimum cost, then the Best Node
is updated
as the current medoids.
6. i is incremented afterwards and if it is greater than 100, then the Best
Node is given as
output otherwise whole process is repeated.
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With the clustering technique, the high resolution electrical measurement data
can be
separated into clustered data that include a first cluster representing a
first electrical trend and
a second cluster representing an another electrical trend. In other examples,
there may be
more clusters to segregate the high resolution electrical measurement data.
Referring back to figure 3, at 207, the clustered data that is generated can
be provided as a
first representation in a graphical format for inspection of anomaly
detection. The first
representation may contain outlier data that is indicative of an anomalous
event relating to the
collected electrical data and the outlier event information can be
identifiable from the
representation by inspection. Alternatively or additionally, a threshold may
be set to
automatically determine whether the clustered information includes outlier
data. For example,
if the clustered data value is below or above a value by a certain percentage,
for example, six
percent, this can be indicative of the data being outlier data.
Validation may then occur given that the electrical signal received by the
pPMU during a day
was also collected by a PQM. The detected outlier events from the clustered
data can be
validated by mapping or correlating the PQM data which would have generated an
alert when
an anomalous event had been detected. The alert may include graphical
representation of the
PQM data at a high resolution showing the anomalous event.
The clustering approach is now described according to an example experiment.
In the
example, the clustering approach has been experimented on three-phase voltage
phasor data
for 10 consecutive days (1st May ¨ 10th May 2020) to categorize its functional
behavior and
detect anomalies on the power distribution system. Each day, 8.64 million
voltage phasor data
points are gathered per phase. The results have been shown in figure 6 for 1st
May 2020. Fig.
6 presents the CLARANS outcomes of the line-1 (first phase), line-2 (second
phase), and line-
3 (third phase) voltages. From this figure it has been seen that the shape of
both clusters in
each figure are spherical each having a centre, thus depicting that a
partitioning based method
should work well to separate data patterns distinctly. Fig. 6(a), 6(b), and
6(c) shows the line-
1 patterns, line-2 patterns, and line-3 patterns respectively where the
outliers are clearly visible
in two distinct cluster types Cl (shown in a first shade for explanation
purposes) and C2
(shown in a second shade). The outliers are part of cluster Cl or C2 but
sufficiently far
removed from the higher density cluster centre. With reference to fig. 6(b),
for example,
outliers 01 and 02 are shown with outlier 01 being part of cluster Cl but far
removed and
outlier 02 being part of cluster C2 but far removed. This clustering causes
the data to be
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grouped based on the magnitude variation throughout the day, where, in the
example shown,
one group comprises voltage magnitudes between -1.85 to -1.86 kV and the other
group
contains -1.87 to -1.88 kV respectively. The detected outlier events from the
clustered data
have been validated by the power quality measurement data and the abrupt event
examples
are shown in the figure 7. Fig. 7 is a window showing 1.5 hours of data, where
the exact
voltage dip event along with its time and magnitude is displayed. It has found
that the voltage
dip (-11.15 am and -12.56 pm) occurred two times D1, D2 during this period and
reaches a
magnitude of 1.76 kV, captured precisely by the clustering approach. It can be
seen that the
clustering approach as described can provide useful performance grouping of
high-resolution
pPMU data for outlier detection.
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